Mobile

A new app for streaming music service Spotify wants people to donate to charity in return for getting their favorite songs played during friends’ parties. The Guilty Pledgers app requires party hosts to sign in using Facebook, then open up a party playlist. Friends can then pledge to any of a range of charities — more than 13,000 available on the JustGiving website — in return for adding tracks of their choice to the playlist. It’s the first fundraising app to be launched on Spotify.

This year the Academy Awards featured a tribute to the classic and beloved film "The Wizard of Oz," in honor of the movie’s 75th anniversary. We think there is something everyone can learn from Oz … even about mobile fundraising! Here are a few famous lines from the classic movie and how we think you can apply them to your mobile program.

Ted Hart speaks with Philip King, vice president of mobile and business development at Sheads & Associates, a Cornerstone Co., about mobile fundraising on his Nonprofit Coach radio show.

I know I'm supposed to think QR codes are great, but really I am just confused about them.

Time spent chasing promises to give online is better spent thanking actual donors.

With 51 percent of email now opened on a tablet or smartphone, nonprofits should redesign their e-newsletters as soon as possible. Long-standing e-newsletter design best practices such as a two- or three-column-fixed layout, 12-point font size and text-based links only are officially 51 percent less effective. Unless your nonprofit embraces responsive design or mobile-first design aesthetics, your stories and calls to action will go unread and untapped. If email is integral to your communications and fundraising strategy, redesigning your e-newsletter to make it mobile-compatible should be at the top of your to-do list.

Jan. 28, Michael Sabat, VP of business development at Mobile Commons, co-hosted a webinar with Dawn Bickett from Greenpeace USA and Lawrence Grodeska from Change.org. The webinar covered how nonprofits can use SMS campaigns to engage their supporters with mobile.

Watch the video below for mobile usage statistics, best practices for integrating mobile into campaigns, and examples of past and ongoing campaigns from Greenpeace USA and other large nonprofit organizations.

More than 50 percent of all emails will be opened via a mobile devices in 2014. Here are six strategies to help your nonprofit cater to this sweeping landscape, according to Mike Snusz of npENGAGE: 1. Decrease email width. 2. Increase text size. 3. Keep emails below 102KB. 4. Use short, engaging subject lines. 5. Use short paragraphs to keep attention. 6. Understand what your emails look like.

While text-to-give was an early, high-profile mobile-marketing success story, recent developments and the availability of other potentially more effective strategies could result in a shrinking role going forward. Last fall, the major wireless carriers stopped supporting premium SMS, but not text-to-give programs for nonprofits and political campaigns. However, the upheaval and uncertainty caused by the news is just one reason nonprofits could begin looking beyond text-to-give.

At Artez Interactive, we wanted to know more about the impact of mobile devices on peer-to-peer, or “crowd-sourced,” fundraising campaigns. When individuals are motivated to ask their friends and social networks to donate to a cause, are those supporters using smartphones and tablets to help them fundraise? Similarly, are donors in peer-driven events giving through mobile-Web-enabled devices?